I just don't understand what I'm doing wrong, it's not like this is the first mirror I have done.  Excuse the image, it isn't a finished piece.  I've included the mirror texture, the render settings and what the image looks like when I render... everything looks fine except for the girl, she's so dark.  I have 5 lights, all kinda random, a mix of spots, infinite and points

so what am I missing?

I think you are just missing any lights that illuminate the front of her. Look at the right side of her face (not in the mirror) - it is almost completely dark. That's what we can see in the mirror too.

My advice would be to use an IBL light. Use a fairly high-contrast but not too coloured IBL image, set the IBL contrast to 1.0 (not the default value 3.0), and the intensity fairly low (10 to 20 %).

was trying that too, but even the IBL's come out fairly dark... though in my last hour of searching, I might have found some new things I didn't know :P

uncheck "refl_lite_mult".  this would be a good one for GI, assuming they added a GUI to poser 8.

It can be surprisingly hard to illuminate the front of the figure when a
mirror is present.   Try putting a spotlight just above the mirror, turned
toward the face. 

(For comparison, think about real life... If you're relying on a ceiling light,
you won't see yourself very well in a mirror.  In a typical bathroom,
there's a light just above the mirror.)

Every time you start a new material, mirror or not, I dont' care what it is, do the following:

Uncheck Reflect_Lite_Mult and Reflect_Kd_Mult

Never turn them on.

lol, yeah, I don't know how that got turned on, must been something else I did, but even after I turned it off, it still gave the same results.

and I am trying the spotlight on the other side of the mirror trick, just have to find the right spot and intensity to match it up :P

This is one of those situations where you're going to end up saying "lighting is hard in Poser" unless you use gamma correction.

nah, i got it, I just set a spot light on the other side of the mirror and set the distance down a bit, then "pointed": it at the neck, seems to work perfect :D

Poser doesn't like lights coming from the back, is not like real life, so is useless to illuminate the mirror, it will illuminate nothing.
Is a little tricky with mirrors, you have to illuminate who is looking at the mirror (she) with extra lights, but these lights cannot come from the back, you must play with the camera and light angles until you find a combination that works.